I have thought that cityscapes are too monotonous and even doomed because most of the buildings are grey consists of dark cement or metal. Sometimes I feel they are a lack of colors and sensibility. Along with this thought, I have been inspired by some cases that street artist revives slum villages or undeveloped cities by coloring old buildings. Personally, I went on a design trip to London in 2012, and a purpose of the trip is to research how slum villages can be revived by street art and benchmark them in order to re-design a street in Korea. We visited Hackney, a multi-cultural city in London, which had been revived by street art and community warfare. Inhabitants in Hackney were poor and the it was high crime rate city in London in the past, but city reconstruction project was successful and contributed to change the city as an artistic, cultural landmark within the east London. Particularly, street art like graffiti and art education for children were a big energy behind of the revival of the city. Inspired by the examples of cities which were revived by street art, I want to adapt the idea, that gives color to gray cities, to my game.

Based on the fact that my online identification is connected with each other. I wanted to create an iOS app that visualizes individual’s time and money spending on their daily lives by aggregating their private data, connecting to debit or credit cards, health trackers, wearable devices, internet searching history. This app shows users how much time they spent on SNS and other websites and also figure their favorite brands and consumption habits with simple bubble charts. The main purpose of this app is to enable people to check their daily lifestyle and preferences at a glance by interacting with bubbles. People can check their budget balances to get rid of the bubbles as well.

In terms of the context of critical design, the app is in the domain of surveillance design. Because this app utilizes individual’s personal data to analyze their lifestyle, it is a kind of invasion of a person’s privacy in some ways. However, people today are easily allowing these kinds of service to use their private data. People are seeking convenience and productivity by sacrificing their privacy in this smart, hyper-connected society of technology. This app will redefine the privacy in this era by showing an example all the personal devices are connected and manipulating by an algorithm in the era of Internet of Things.

The implementation of the project is now a prototype – the demo video that shows main concept and functions of the app and a GUI flow. But I want to develop this idea for the further version by conducting a deeper research how to establish a systematic algorithm that analyzes people’s lifestyle. I want to learn machine learning to look into how computer design reactive analysis of personal data, not just displaying data by numbers. Also, I want to figure how this kind of project and personal preferences of brands can be utilized for marketing and advertising. The big data that is gathered by this app can be a great resource for market analysis and consumer psychology as well.

Project Pitch

Project Name : Bubble Life (or Spent)

I’m creating an app (prototype) which visualizes the time and money that people spend daily by analyzing individuals’ personal data such as internet searching history, physical activities and expenditure in order to show their lifestyle to users at a glance and figure out the connectivity between each data that identifies a person.